The transformative support of Partech from 0 to exit: Dejbox inside story

[This is a guest post by Vincent Dupied, Co-founder & CEO of Dejbox. This is also a follow up on my first post The Dejbox success story, an oddity in the food delivery space, and on my former post (in French) about VC value-add]

Partech, a transformative VC for Dejbox

In 2015, we were very young founders with Adrien, with nothing more than an idea and a first proof of concept. We had no idea what building a startup meant or required.

When we first met Boris at Euratech, this was a huge slap & by far one of the most important moments in the Dejbox story. I don’t say that to please Partech or Boris (we don’t care, he left our board ;) ), but because I want to truly highlight in the most sincere way to which extent a highly talented & incredibly dedicated VC can be transformative for your business! Hopefully, it can also be useful to other entrepreneurs in how they will choose & develop a relationship with their own investors (as none of the many founders I know have had a VC like him on their side). 

To me, Boris is not just an investor, but really more like our 3rd co-founder! He indeed developed over the first months & subsequent years a deep business understanding & intimacy with Dejbox. For instance, he knows our business in every single detail, be it a little brick of our business model, or the subtlety of some very specific business metrics. It makes him the most legitimate person in my views to provide his opinion or suggestions. Beyond a strong human fit, this level of understanding of our business was the basis of our relationship.

There would be so much to say about all this, as the work done together during those years has been gigantic… Here is a limited collection of examples that stuck in my memories, together with topics that look very important to me more generally for all founders with their VCs. 

1/ Strategy: pushing us to refine & validate our model early to unlock growth

At one of our very first board meetings together, it was February 2016 and we had just raised 500K€ with Partech. We were super happy with Adrien, the business was starting to grow in Lille and we had just hired our first delivery people. We wanted to double down in 2016 in Lille alone, which already looked like a lot of work to us. 

However, Boris convinced us to quickly open new cities (Paris & Lyon) for 2 reasons: (i) make sure that the market we had spotted in Lille was not a local specificity and could be serviced in the same way in other cities, and (ii) start building & scaling a multi-site model, deeply different from a mono-site one, before we had grown too much and overfitted for our local business! Alone, we would never had taken this decision, because it looked so early to us.

That however prove to be defining for our business: we learned so many things about operational & business organization, and having 3 live cities also fostered a strong growth that was key to trigger our next financing round 1 year later!

2/ Pitch deck: conceptualizing & pitching our model

When we prepared for our Series A (only 2M€ and ultimately led by Partech Seed Fund, which is highly unusual & a testimony to our unique story with Partech), we felt the need to build a much better pitch deck than we had previously. Because our model & positioning were subtle, and quite easy to confuse with existing ones. And we also wanted to show how surprisingly sexy our business was, beyond our promising numbers, and why we believed we could grow & operate it at a much bigger scale in a “mechanical” way, with highly positive unit economics!

We literally spent weeks on it with Boris. This work has been absolutely instrumental in the years that followed to step back & better define our model, clarify our strengths & unicity, make a highly-compelling & irresistible pitch (this typical “wow effect” of the Dejbox model), and develop our operational & growth processes. This is still today the basis for most of our growth & business decisions!

3/ KPIs: extreme rigor in how we look at & monitor our business 

Business KPIs, financial analysis, deepdive in the data… It’s an euphemism to say that Boris is at ease with numbers & data :) He sets a very high bar on those, and the slightest inconsistency or mistake was spotted, well… immediately! 

It forced us to an extreme rigor, that has been absolutely decisive in reaching the right level of excellence/relevance to monitor & steer our business as it needed to (which is a lot as far as we are concerned at Dejbox), which further increased as we scaled. 

4/ Push-backs: avoiding potentially deadly mistakes 

A great VC will help you step back, and also leverage his experience, to try to avoid critical mistakes in your strategic decisions. Indeed, as young entrepreneurs, it’s quite easy to make the wrong decisions that could potentially kill your business… When you are in the daily life of running your business & energized by the newly raised round of founding, it’s easy to lose track of reality and make one. 

In every startup journey, there are multiple opportunities to make those deadly mistakes. Here are 2 critical ones that Boris avoided us:

1. Scaling too fast, too early: if we were shy after our seed round, after our Series A, we were super bullish and wanted to open as many cities as we could very quickly (although we already had 3 up & growing). It now seems totally crazy to us, but at the time it looked sound ;) Boris prevented us from doing this mistake and likely following the trajectory of many other foodtech companies (i.e. bankruptcy). We finally kept refining our model & organization in our 3 cities (which was already a lot at our stage & in this space!) and only opened Bordeaux 9 months later (January 2018), and then Nantes & Grenoble (September 2019). We learned a lot and thanks to that, are now a real “Swiss watch”, perfectly running, making us fully ready to open new cities at scale!
2. Lack of focus: this one is also around the corner for every single startup! So many adjacent opportunities have been uncovered in our journey that is was very tempting for us to also launch for instance other offers that some of our customers or prospects wanted, and that looked fairly easy to launch (but it is never as simple as you think). Boris always helped us to focus on our core business, killing unnecessary distractions to crack our big market with our unique offer & positioning!

5/ Organization: redesigning it as you scale 

We went from 2 to 350 employees in 4 years only! As our company quickly grew, we had to redesign our organization on a regular basis, together with the role of each person. This was absolutely key to ensure a sustainable growth! Once again, when you’re a (first-time) founder, it’s hard to be 100% objective & clear. 

As a former entrepreneur & now VC, Boris had already witnessed some of those challenges, but, most importantly, he knew our culture & key people, so that he had a mixed internal & external point of view on Dejbox. He was thus instrumental in helping us challenge & redesign our organization across time (the organization by function, the roles & responsibilities, the profiles to hire, etc), and now feeling ready to develop Dejbox at high speed.

6/ Coaching: having a VC on your side, both supportive & challenging

A startup is a rollercoaster: one day, king of the world (incredible growth the week before), the day after, mood close to zero (a top candidate refused your offer).

Boris has always been extremely engaged & present, and perfectly played this double role according to the situation & stakes: 

• being extremely supportive & reinsuring during the “lows”, and helping us find solutions as a team, while helping us to step back on what we had already accomplished,
• being challenging (but always fair) when we needed to, for instance when things went really well but it was already time to think about the future, or when we were ready to make potentially bad decisions!

In the end: more like our 3rd co-founder!

One of the very first advice I got as an entrepreneur was: “Surround yourself wisely, and hire talents!”. In my opinion, this starts with choosing your investors, because they are for sure the ones that will stay for long… The human chemistry & business fit are absolutely key!

To this regard, our very first key “hire” at Dejbox has been Boris & Partech. We’ve spent hundreds of hours together each year, went through exhilarating, hard & intense moments… This has always been an incredible pleasure & gift to have Boris on our side, available day & night (it’s by the way the opportunity to say sorry to his wife Delphine for all the late calls & disturbance :) ).

VCs should not just be “money” or reporting freaks (as it seems they often can be, based on the multiple conversations I’ve had with the founders I know), but rather first & foremost a transformative partner for your business! We simply wouldn’t be where we are today without the support from Boris & Partech, and I honestly consider it has been a real privilege to have them onboard! If one day I were to start a new company, Boris would be the very first person I’d call!

A huge, huge THANK YOU for this amazing journey together… We get out of it deeply transformed, grown up, and most importantly, fully ready to open a new, super exciting chapter of the Dejbox story with Carrefour!!

Among so many others, a great memory together (which reminds us how quickly time flies!), when Boris was at our HQ during his due diligence in November 2015 and Dejbox was still so small...

And for all those who will have the opportunity to work with him, here is a piece of advice: get ready for an incredible adventure… but also buy lots of vitamins!! ;)

Vincent Dupied, co-founder & co-CEO of Dejbox